I’m not seeing the big deal here. When the title said it’s spying on me, I thought it was listening with its microphone. This is making a big deal about nothing AFAIK.
Of course it needs your bloody Spotify username, it streams Spotify for you, and the control protocol runs through a cloud service so that you can control it universally. Complaining about that seems like idiocy, frankly.
I can buy an Arylic board for 1/10th the price of a Sonos speaker. It functions in exactly the same way and doesn't collect my data. The information Sonos collects is not necessary.
What’s an Arylic board? Googling only revealed DIY Bluetooth speakers which don’t function at all in the same way.
If they want to do stupid value-added convenience crap then fine. But does the speaker work without the account? (No.)
There are many possible paths they could take for allowing the device to connect to various services and other devices, and Sonos happened to choose the cheap way. These smart devices should not require a cloud connection just to operate when there are plenty of ways of interfacing with them that are completely local.
My Windows computer does not require a Microsoft account to be able to use Spotify or Netflix or whatever. These things can all run independently and be setup through a local connection or a digital display. Why should a speaker?